Speaker A: All right, hello and welcome everyone to another episode of Waiting to Be Signed, a special anniversary interview. episode. We're joined today by Ciphrd, who needs no introduction, but just in case, he's the one who created fx hash, the platform to which this show is dedicated. And of course, Trinity is here. How's it going, everyone?

Speaker B: I'm excited.

Speaker C: Doing good. Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure.

Speaker A: Well, it's been a huge year. We're super excited to have you on. The last time we talked to you, was in March. So about 8 months ago, just before 1.0 came out, we were super excited for a lot of the new features that were in the roadmap at that time. Dutch auctions, reserves, collabs.

Speaker B: Tokens.

Speaker A: Tokens, which maybe we'll get to later, but perhaps this is a good place to start, which is like kind of going back and looking at some of the big milestones from 1.0 and how you feel they've played out. So in particular, maybe the one that's been most impactful on people who collect and engage with the site day to day, and artists as well, is Dutch auctions and reserves. So how do you feel about how those have played out? We've talked a lot about them on the show, the dynamics, the way they play with the floor, the way that they play with the collector base and flippers. So from your perspective on the platform, like, how are those mechanics working?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: From my perspective, I'm not going in depth into the statistics and how every feature is like shaping how communities interact together. But I have like, of course, observed a few things. First of all, maybe talking about the reserve list. I think in the beginning it was a bit chaotic, especially on Twitter. Lots of artists were basically doing some raffles for some reserve list spots. Which was not quite why the feature was developed. But again, it's a feature like another, so everyone can use it as they see fit. I think there's less and less artists doing this on Twitter. I also believe that's because it's not very practical to do it. I feel like a few collectors have complained about this rightfully. I think The Reserve, I think, is giving lots of options on the platform right now. So I'm thinking especially about Tender. And the Tender Pass, like, I feel like the feature has been quite helpful in shaping how they want people to interact with their PCs, with their token. So they can specify different reserve types for different groups of people, which quite match what the pass is made for in the first place. That's my takeaway on the reserve list. Again, I did not dive much into this. As for the Dutch auction, I think it's been pretty good, especially for drops where there's lots of traction. It helped reduce the gas wars that were happening on those tokens. So before, like, we released this feature, I know that for some artists whose work was quite anticipated, there was quite some gas on the transactions, up to a point where there was more gas being spent than money gave to the artists in some instances, which was a bit sad to observe as a platform owner. But yeah, I believe Dutch auctions helped in that regard. So now there are still like spikes of gas when reaching a certain Dutch auction step, but it's way less important than what it used to be. So I think that that's pretty good. And in terms of the dynamics that it has created, again, like I did not monitor this very carefully. As a collector, I'm always on the secondary market for anticipated drops just because I'm, I don't usually don't have the time to click at the right moment and everything. So I'm just picking one I like on secondary market.

Speaker B: This toolset has been so helpful sometimes when we're talking to people who are new to the platform and talking about how we minted way back in December or January where it was just click the button as fast as you can, hope and pray. I think that these particular tools have been so impactful and thank you so much for putting the thought and effort into releasing them. It's been crazy. And, you know, I think we'll still see people innovate with them in the future. I think the other really big release that came out with 1.0 was the collaboration contract. We've seen that in heavy use both within the artist community and also the fxhash official collaborations of which there have been many. Any thoughts around that particular feature and functionality?

Speaker C: Yeah, I feel like this, out of all the features that were released with 1.0, it was the most significant in terms of what it brought artistically to the platform. I've put lots of efforts into designing it carefully because I know that back then it was implemented on some platforms not really well. It wasn't really tied to the platform itself. For instance, on TIA, you will see the contract address, the smart contract address for the collaboration. So you didn't quite know which artist was in this collaboration. It didn't appear on their own page and everything. So I really wanted this to be tightened, the platform itself, and also make it easy for the artist to preview which transaction they were going to send and everything. So I think it helped, it helped this feature like evolve properly over the last months because artists had it was easy for them to manipulate the tool. There was a bit of friction, but also it's such a complex system. You know, you have to approve transactions, you have to have all your collaborators see and approve to then execute. So it's quite a difficult system, and I'm happy that people are using it without much trouble now. And I was really happy to see how it helped shape a new artistic landscape on the platform. For instance, there's been collaborations between non-coder artists and coders. that are working together, many instances of usage of this tool. And to me, it was the most interesting of all the tools being released for the V1.

Speaker A: Trinity was pointing to us during that statement.

Speaker B: Sorry.

Speaker C: Yeah, I figured that I should not have pointed that out because it's recorded audio.

Speaker A: But yeah, I mean, it's been awesome for us. We've actually been doing a little bit of accounting recently and some of our most successful efforts to bring in support have been through collaborations with artists. You know, that also just speaks to the generosity of those artists, right, in supporting the show, but then that they would put us on the contract and work with us and incorporate some aspect of the podcast into the art. It's like, it's been awesome. We've even had artists who've released projects and just put us on the contract at like 5%, just as a way of supporting us. So it's been really cool.

Speaker C: Yeah, I'm really happy to see these kinds of events emerging from a system where you have the ability to do it in the first place. That was also introduced with the V1, actually, the splits on the primary and secondary market. Yeah, I'm happy to see that contributors to the ecosystem can benefit quite naturally from all of these features. So happy to hear that.

Speaker B: We have benefited from this. I think the community has also benefited from this, from just having access to the melding of minds in terms of great work. The launch of 1.0 really came out with that big bang of a collaboration or official collaboration. between Yazid and Zancan, Kindergarten Monuments. Obviously the support there has been absolutely insane. Have there been any collaborations, either fxhash official ones or not, that have really captured your interest?

Speaker C: Oh yeah, there must have been a lot.

Speaker B: I have a list.

Speaker C: So I will say that the Tender collaboration, there's a few of them that really caught my attention. In particular, there was Reconnaissance, which was like It's a technique that I've been exploring as an artist, and seeing it being used in such a way was really great. I love this piece really much. There's also, uh, oh God, I'm going to butcher his name, but Watkins, the faces one. God, I don't even remember.

Speaker B: Emotional Shell.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: It was, to me, one of my favorite pieces on the platform so far, just because it's Quite a simple concept. It's been used before, but it's been shaped in a way that's very unique to this piece, can create a lot of emotions. And when I introduce people to gen art now, I'm either using Garden Monoliths from Zancan because it has this wow effect, or Emotional Shell because also it has this quite wow effect. And I like to introduce people to gen art by telling them, yeah, see, this is like quite beautiful visually, but there is like no assets in it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: It's like fully code. And this is for me what triggers the wow effect in people and get them to see how code can be powerful and how it's not just triangles and circles because it could have been what they had in mind in the first place.

Speaker A: That was such a mind-blowing drop when it came out. And I think for some collectors it was like a little unsettling too, but that's part of art, right? Sometimes you have to kind of be a little disturbed by it.

Speaker B: Some people use it as their PFP and it's unnerving every single time. It's just the creepiest project on the platform.

Speaker A: But in a good way.

Speaker C: Yeah, in a good way. That's maybe why I liked it so much, because I've been a fan of creepy aesthetics and creepy art for a while. Like, I used to do very creepy stuff back then with horror movies, collage, things like that. So maybe that's why I relate also.

Speaker A: Let me ask something just to get this out of the way. This is kind of a personal pet issue of mine. With 1.0, I don't remember exactly when it came out, But we added scheduled releases for the ability for artists to post their project and then add a countdown to it so it comes out at the day and time of their choice. So now that we essentially have artwork releasing around the clock, do we really still need the cycles? Do we need to restrict artists to like when they can actually post the work if we're not restricting them to when they can release it? Because we're still seeing this issue of artists like not paying attention to the schedule and then—

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: messaging on Twitter and then going and then being like, oh, I can't actually release it because it's closed for 2 days. So this is my one appeal. Is there— has there been any discussion in the, in the back rooms of like, do we still need this rotating system?

Speaker C: So it's always an ongoing discussion and it's been a problem for us too. For instance, there's like sometimes professors that reach out because they want to introduce people to FX, but their class is outside of the opening schedule. And so we are like, oh yeah, that's such a shame because it would be a perfect— we would need the platform to be open for these instances. So we've opened the platform especially out of the schedule for this kind of events. But to be fair, it's like not something that we can do every event that requires it. So I feel like we are going to reevaluate this pretty soon just because even for our events, so for instance, the live minting installations that we're making for Art Basel, Yeah. We require artists to post slightly in advance, and it's a bit difficult for them to, you know, there is a tight schedule and it might not fit within their time zone depending on how the cycle has rotated. And so it's difficult for them to post and it creates a lot of problems. But on the other end, it's still like it creates sort of life for the platform. You know, it's open, closed at other times. We can expect new projects to always come within a cycle, so they might not release, but we will see them appear first within a cycle, which create this small effect, but I believe it's way less impactful than what it used to be, just because the platform has grown so much. It's now being used over the world by so many different people that maybe the schedule is not as great as it used to be. So eventually we'll reevaluate it and ask the community about it. But yeah, it's an ongoing discussion. We had maybe this discussion 2 weeks ago. It got stale, but we will eventually start it again. Yeah.

Speaker B: I think this is such a tough one. You know, it is kind of less impactful, as you said, as it used to be. But on the flip side, I really appreciate there being 2 days a week where I can kind of step away from my computer, not have to worry about new mints coming out, even though there might be ones that are scheduled. I, I can anticipate those and come back to my computer when I know that they're there. It is nice to have that break, especially when we're in like an always-on community. It's not an easy decision, that's for sure.

Speaker C: Maybe it's more about having some little breaks once in a while, rather than having a schedule that's open. 1/3 of a day every day. The 2 days off are maybe what's still really meaningful in this cycling.

Speaker A: When we last talked about this, the argument I was most sympathetic to was trying not to bias the site towards NA or EU and making sure that territories around the globe had their action on the platform, right? But now that we have scheduled releases, that kind of takes away that issue. And from the collecting side, like, I agree, it's cool To have these 2 days off and know whether or not you need to be plugged in or not because you can see what's coming out. But it feels now the only impact that it's having is negative, at least from my perspective on the collector side. Something happens like, for example, the Horizons drop. They had to take it down, then they wanted to put it back up, but then in the period of time that they took it down, the platform closed and then they couldn't put it back up. And then they ended up having to delay it by like 5 days or 7 days. So it's little instances like that that it's creating a lot of unnecessary friction and I'm glad to hear that you guys are still talking about it. But I'm— we can move on from this.

Speaker C: Yeah, we're still talking about this because it's as much as a pain for us too, for the points that I've mentioned just before, like it creates so many friction for so many different instances.

Speaker A: Well, maybe moving on and somewhat related to the question of minting or the topic of minting is the number of live minting events that FXHash has been a part of over the summer and now fall. I feel like we've seen What has it been, like 6, 7, 8 even between the Art Basels and—

Speaker B: Proof of People, NFT Show, Bright Moments.

Speaker C: 7 or 8.

Speaker A: And you traveled a lot. I know other fx hash team members were traveling as well. So are you finally settled now? Are you recovering? Are you going to go to Miami? Like, are you just going to be on the circuit now, like traveling year round? Like, what's the plan with these live events? And how has it been like taking part in them?

Speaker C: Such a wide question. There's so much to talk about with this. It's been so wild for me to travel that much, especially within Europe. I'm trying to limit taking the plane as much as possible. I will be going to Miami because I want to go to the United States once in my life, but I feel like next year I'm going to travel way less just because going to this event is taking so much energy. It's so great. I mean, meeting so many artists and people from the community has been so wonderful. And again, it's been maybe one of the best moments of my life at many instances during these events. But also it takes a lot of energy. It takes time to recover and it drives the mind away from building the tools for the platform. So sometimes I come back, I'm a bit in a fuzzy state of mind for a few days where I'm not super able to think clearly about everything that I'd like. But also it helped the platform grow because in the future I really want us to have a solid framework for these live minting events. So that's also why I wanted to see in person how it would go, like what was the friction, how to make it easier for people at these events. When we introduced paid live minting at NFT Show Europe, there was a lot of friction just because people didn't necessarily have a wallet. So we were thinking, okay, how can we improve this? Because long term we really want our platform to also have tools so that people can set up live events, because I feel like this will be one of, if not the most powerful way to reach out to new audiences. But yeah, it's been so tiring to travel this much, to be fair. Like, next year is going to be way less, I think, for me, just because I want to focus a little bit more on myself and the platform. But still, if we can go to Tokyo, I'm not going to say no, you know.

Speaker B: You should definitely do that. Last time we talked way back in March, it was more or less just you. You were thinking about maybe hiring one other developer to work with you. And obviously there's, you know, the, the team of community support people over in the Discord to really help with the lift around moderation, you know, helping people out, that sort of thing. In the community update from last week or a couple of weeks ago, You have talked about how there's growth in the team. You've hired more developers, you've hired people who can do marketing, operations, that sort of thing. How has it been with the actual growth of the official fxhash team?

Speaker C: And interesting to talk about this because I feel like in the last, not the last month, but let's say the last 4 or 5 months, okay, it's actually what's been slowing us a lot in the development of the platform. When I used to be alone, it was very fast and easy to iterate on features because again, you're alone, so you can do everything by yourself and you have a clear idea of how everything ties together. But also it's not very scalable and it creates a big point of failure because if I'm not available, then how will the platform keep going? And also like our operation started to get bigger, like doing all of these live minting events required people to help the artist, required people to be available for the dev side.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And so a lot of our efforts in the last months has been to shift from us being very decentralized with people contributing but not being paid for the contribution back then to, you know, a more centralized entity where we can process tasks a little bit more easier. And again, I'm saying centralized entity because it's required to have some part of centralization to even make a product work.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: grow, to evolve a product. The product can be decentralized in how it works, but to bring this product to life and improve it, you need to have a central entity that's going to iterate over it. These were a lot of efforts. So right now I think we are around 15 people in the team. So on the dev aspect, we are 6 now, 5, 6, depending on who's available. And there's people handling events, community. communication, artist relations. So basically all of the components that are required for us to grow in the future. And it was very difficult because, you know, I don't really have business background at all. So I had to learn everything and it was very slow for me to process this new information and apply it in the best possible way for the team. So that's why there's been a bit of a slowdown in how the platform was able to ship features because also we had to train new developers. We have to find pipelines, internal pipelines on how we can improve the product. It was quite intense, maybe more intense than bringing the platform to the V1 actually, but it was also interesting experience.

Speaker B: Hopefully you can take a vacation soon. Well deserved.

Speaker C: I'm slowing down to be fair. Like I'm trying to work less and have more time for myself.

Speaker B: That's good and healthy. You should definitely, you should definitely do that.

Speaker A: I think I have a related question here. First of all, it's awesome to hear that you brought on so many people and, you know, we talked to Liam a few weeks back, so it sounds like he's involved. And obviously I think some of the mods that we know from Discord have found roles in the team, which is great. But we're in a little bit of a bear market right now. There's been a lot of, not necessarily FUD or concern, but obviously like a lot of platforms like OpenSea have seen a big drop in volume. I'm not actually sure we've seen such a severe drop on fxhash, but the price of Tez is down. Just conditions are not what they were, say, back when even we spoke in March when things felt a lot more optimistic and the price of Tez was higher. It's opened up this whole conversation about creator royalties, and it was awesome to see fxhash coming out, I think along with Object, right? Like committing to honoring those creator royalties. And obviously it's an important part of what fxhash is doing, but have there been any moments of concern in the last few months at all? Like, or is that just something that you don't even pay attention to at this point?

Speaker C: I'm paying close attention to it, to be fair. I'm not quite surprised that we've reached this state right now, and I'm expecting it to be even worse in the upcoming weeks, if not months. The state of the economy right now in the world is quite bad and is not in a great state for crypto to also, you know, thrive. To me, it was a bit expected that we will reach such a state. We will have to wait for the economy to get back on its tracks for the crypto also to follow. I think like that's natural. That was needed in the ecosystem because, you know, it kept growing, growing to like unhealthy points. PFP were selling at millions for no particular reason except speculation. And I think like this bear market has also filtered a little bit which projects bring value to the ecosystem, which projects were underneath like just void. And I feel like people are now much more sensible on which project to invest. I'm just happy to see this, but also like it's quite hard to, you know, have an optimistic view of the future knowing that the crypto are crashing that much. But again, it was a needed cycle after all this crazy growth. The reality had to come back at some point. It was not sustainable. And I feel like we will eventually reach a state where we find sort of an equilibrium between the value that crypto brings to the people and the value that people see it brings to them. Not sure if I make sense, but basically, you know, this equilibrium where the economic system will hold its actual value. But again, I'm not very good at analyzing everything like this. There are people in the team that are way better than me right now at doing this, and we are taking necessary steps so that if everything falls down, you know, we can keep going for a few months until it gets in a better state.

Speaker A: Every time a Zancan sells, that's like a little bit of payroll for the month, right?

Speaker C: It is indeed, yeah. For FX itself, like, we haven't quite— every time, like, the crypto crashes, our sales are increasing on the other end. And that's, I think, what I meant by people are investing in something they think will hold more value. And I think it relates to art in general and generative art. So to me, generative art is going to be this art movement of our era, just because it's the first form of art that's really proper to computers and really highlights what computers are and what they mean for humanity. And I think that as such, generative art is going to be the art movement of our era, and it's going to be what we look back upon and say, okay, this has been a really new way of creating art that's never existed before. And that's also why I think people are investing a lot in gen art, because they start to understand, maybe not with like a deep understanding, but have the feeling that something's going on there because We all have this feeling, I think, when we see code-generated art, we're like, whoa, this is really something, right? And that's maybe the feeling that's driving our generative art ecosystem in the right direction.

Speaker A: Totally. And like, we've done some very non-scientific research into—

Speaker B: Very scientific research.

Speaker A: Yeah, very, very non-scientific research into like the fiat price of some of the quote unquote top projects on the platform as Tez fell. And it's like, If you're holding RGBs or Contrapuntos or Zancans, like, despite how much Tez is down, how bad the markets are, you're still up in dollar terms, which is crazy to think about. Kind of shows that we're in the right place building and collecting and just hanging out.

Speaker C: I think that's a great marker. You're right to highlight this. As mentioned, when the prices of the currency crashes, our sales are increasing in the other direction. So there is compensation. And I think that's Really because the species really hold the value that, uh—

Speaker B: We've been seeing that a lot in the last 24 to 48 hours, maybe more the last week as everything's going to hell. And, you know, it also is, I think, what triggered that really big run back in May when everything just was flying in through the roof. I think it was the first time that Tez was under $2. Yesterday we dipped below $1 for, I think, the first time in many, many years. So there's been that also continued conversation around chain security, you know, not just how safe is it, but the longevity of it. There was a good Twitter Space, I think yesterday or the day before with Tender and Zeneca. And the one thing that makes me feel really great about Tezos is that it's not the most financialized chain. People aren't here to make money in traditional financial ways. And people are really here because they love what's happening on the chain. You know, from more of a digital collectibles, air quotes, standpoint. Are you still feeling good about being on Tezos versus any other chain?

Speaker C: Yes, I actually do. I came on Tezos for a reason in the first place, and I feel like this still stands today. And I'm not really surprised because the reason I came on Tezos was for its community. And I believe that when you have such a strong community, whatever comes, you know, you will find solutions to get I feel like that's what's happening and what's going to happen if shit goes down. We will find solutions to maintain this ecosystem because there's such a strong and vibrant community. And also, I think I've been more and more interested and happy about the direction of the Tezos Foundation in the last year. There's a true effort to highlight the art space.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: on the blockchain. It's maybe the only chain that does that right now. And I think that's something to highlight because we are often, you know, pointing the bad choices they make. And there are a few bad choices, we can't deny that. But also there is a long-term vision that needs to be highlighted. And well, there has been a presence at Art Basel. There will be one for Miami and probably more to come. And it really shows that there's a will to highlight what's working into their ecosystem. And they're noticing this and making the necessary steps to further this.

Speaker B: Maybe just one last question here that's kind of related to like the wonderful community we have, the sort of growth that we've been seeing. How has the pace of the growth of the FXHash community been happening over the last 6, 7, 8 months? I know that at first you were a little bit shocked at the huge spike between end of November and early January. How are you feeling about the overall trajectory at this point?

Speaker C: So we are actually building internal tools to monitor that more carefully because to be fair, up until now, we didn't really have decent tools to monitor this properly. So basically I'm using the same resources that you have. So the App Radar or the community graphs that are built by people. And yeah, so my judgment is based on these tools and maybe not the most accurate data, but well, it's something. I feel like we kind of reached sort of a steady pace right now. There's not so much growth in the users. We see new users coming, but we see also users that don't interact as much as they used to with the smart contracts. I think like that's really fine. Like we are out of, you know, the initial fire rush of the platform coming to life. And it's great that we have now reached sort of stable state from which it's possible to grow. But also, like, we know that if we keep going in this direction, we can keep this amount of users interacting and the artists interacting with the platform. Also, like, we haven't made much efforts towards growing our ecosystem. I think that's something to highlight. We are not actively doing some marketing or anything. We are just basically keeping releasing new tools or helping artists interact with the platform and when we will start maybe try to do some meaningful marketing. By that I mean live events with conceptual installations that highlight generative art and the features that we have to interact with gen art. I think it can be a new influx of users that see the platform in a new light or discover generative art and the blockchain in a new light. Because again, we are still not—

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: public in a way, you know, when you say fx hash, nobody understands what it is on average. And I believe we are going to try to change that in the upcoming years.

Speaker B: And I think that a large part of that has to do with, you know, it's a very open platform, right? You know, Art Blocks, when you talk about Ethereum collectors, it has like a very big name brand association, very few releases, heavily curated. Do you still enjoy the open aspect of fx hash?

Speaker C: Oh, hell yeah, 100%. Like, uh, this is— I stand by this value. This will remain.

Speaker A: If anything, it feels like Art Blocks is moving more towards kind of sliding more towards openness than not.

Speaker C: Maybe, but that's not something that I've observed. I've looked at their recent features and I don't think they're really going to be open at all. If not, it's the opposite. I think they really want to, to keep their focus on curation rather than opening more and more. That's the feeling I have, at least.

Speaker A: I guess my interpretation of like them removing the seasons and just the amount of announcements, it kind of just felt like they were net doing more art, but maybe that's not the case.

Speaker C: Yeah, no, I think they're on the same track as they used to, which is like what they are as a platform. And I think it's great to have this as well on the ecosystem because they sort of represent what it means to have curation It's also quite interesting to see how these 2 visions are going to evolve in the future. I think it will be interesting to monitor also as a social observation.

Speaker A: Let's do the one last feature that kind of came out more recently. Let's talk about it before we move on to the future of the platform and what's coming in year 2. But it was just what, 2, 3 months ago, just kind of very out of nowhere, fx was released, this microblogging platform, I guess, for lack of a better term. How do you feel fx is going and can you talk to us a little bit more about where you think it's headed, how it's being used? Are people using it right? Like, are you surprised by the volume in a good way or in a bad way? What's your take on the community reception to it?

Speaker C: So my initial intent into building this tool, I was in front of the computer looking at some pieces and I thought, damn, it will be so great to have a way with, when being on the piece itself, to have access to a few articles that speak about the piece. Because maybe I want to get some insight, or if I see that the artist has written an article about this, I will maybe get more insights about the processes. And it was like my initial thinking vector on how this feature came to life. When I thought about this, I thought, yeah, okay, we would need some kind of tool to write some text, rich text content, so with images, videos, and the like. But we need it to be some sort of very layer 0 feature in a way. So something that's not opinionated and that's very open to the whole ecosystem. So while my initial intent was to bring more context to the pieces, I started to derive from this and think, okay, how can we have one feature that's really abstract and can be used to give context about a piece? So that's how fx was built, and it's still very in its in fancy stages. So right now it's only on fx hash. You have a space where you can write and read articles, and on the text you have those Tezos storage pointers. That is, it's basically a way to say, okay, I want my text to point to some data into a smart contract. So that's how you can link to generative tokens, or you can link to particular Gentk iterations that you want to highlight. But also It can be used in many other ways, and we still have not implemented the tools to do so. But in the future, fx is going to be a separate platform where you can eventually link to projects uploaded on OBJKT or on TIA or Versum or any platform, actually. And the idea is to create this ecosystem that ties everything, the art together in one space. And let's say that you want to create a new platform and you want people to be able to write articles about the projects that are published on your platform. I want it to be very easy to integrate. So at the cost of a few clicks, you can add a section to your website where all the articles will be published and where people will be able to publish articles for your platform. So again, I think like the reception was great for the writers. Like we've seen so many great content being uploaded, but I think the collectors have not yet really It's much more used as a tip rather than collecting something valuable for the long term. And I think that's fine for now. But also I think that once this whole ecosystem will be tied together into its very own tool and it's a very powerful tool, people will start seeing more value into the tokens that are written. And also fx is like a building block for a much more complex creation system that I have in mind. That I've also like a bit written about on some documents somewhere. Maybe I published, I don't exactly know. But yeah, it's going to be one of the components of a much more bigger curation system.

Speaker A: Oh, that sounds like a good segue into talking about new features then. And I know that next week there's going to be a couple announcements in kind of celebration of the 1-year anniversary. What's going to be announced next week? Like, let's hear it. Let's talk about it.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's going to be very exciting, I think. So we have been working on one feature in particular that's probably going to shape the ecosystem, give a change in how the ecosystem works on the platform. And so the feature is called fx, and basically it's a very simple idea. So right now, when you mint an iteration, it's basically full randomness. You don't have any control over the output that you're going to get. The idea is to give artists the ability to define some parameters that the collector can interact with before minting their piece, and those parameters can have an influence over the output. There will still be the possibility for artists to use the randomness. They will now have the possibility to also use this parametric space that they will expose to the collectors, and they will have the ability to go full parametric space. So you decide exactly the output you're getting. Or you maybe only decide the background color. So you have only one input that you can play with. I think it's going to tie very well with our ecosystem. And I really see this as being a very important component of the platform in the upcoming years.

Speaker B: So a quick question on how this functions, because I think that we've seen similar features elsewhere. Like C-Verso has something that is a much lighter take on that, right? Where you can pick between option A or option B, and then you can mint that. Or you can just reroll it once. How would this interact with sometimes the very speedy minting process that, you know, we experience today even with the Dutch Auctions and Reserves? Is it something that you can play with before, while like the project is in the queue?

Speaker C: Yes, so that's a good point. It wouldn't be meaningful to have the exploration of a parametric space available for collectors and no time to explore it. This will be a 2-step process. In the first step, you're minting a pass, so you're locking the ability to mint your iteration later on. And then you can play for as long as you want with the parametric space, but actually not as long as you want. So there is a bit of a twist there. The mint passes will actually be NFTs, so you will be able to trade those mint passes on the platform itself, but they will also be subject to a Powerberger tax. So the idea is that if you want to hold it, you have to pay the artists as long as you want to hold it. So you have 7 days where you don't have to pay anything and you can mint it. But once those 7 days are reached, you have to pay a fee to the artist to keep it in your wallet. Otherwise, people can claim it. The idea of this tax is to incentivize people in eventually minting their iteration. Otherwise, we can end up with you know, some projects that are half minted and half mint passes that are kept in the wallet until maybe, you know, we don't want to reach a state where the collection is not fully minted, although it's been fully sold in the first place.

Speaker A: Interesting.

Speaker B: Will the mint passes be tradable or sellable in the marketplace?

Speaker C: These will be NFTs. So you will be able to trade those, but a special kind of NFTs. I'm not going to enter into how Arbogast tax works, but basically It's always for sale. Okay. Once the 7 days are past, your mint pass will always be for sale at a price that you set. And you have to pay a fee that's a portion of this price that you're setting. So if you want to keep your mint pass, you will have to set a very high price, but you will have to pay a very high fee to the artist.

Speaker A: I mean, that's a lot to unpack. I feel like that is a feature that when it goes live, I imagine we're going to be discussing the implications of that on the show often. That's really Interesting. Like, that's like a, that's like straight out of a board game, you know, that is such a game theory min-maxer feature, which I love. I think we're just going to all have to digest that. I'm not sure that we can even dig too much deeper into it without a lot of deep thought, but I have a question on the philosophy of this, the prams in general. Like, so we've, we saw it with C-Verso. I think most notably we saw like a very heavy implication of it with QQL.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: recently, right, with Tyler Hobbs and Dandelion. I guess a personal question for you, Ciphrd, like, so do you feel that allowing the minter, the collector, to control features like this at some level, is it still long-form generative art? Is it just regular generative art? Like, do you feel like the category shifts a little bit when it's no longer truly random?

Speaker C: Yeah, I wouldn't be so keen into putting labels over what we are doing. I get the idea of long form versus short form, but also I think it's important for artists to have as many tools as possible and also having these tools accessible, but having a range of tools they can use for their projects. For instance, I've been talking to lots of artists for, and for specific projects, they wanted the collectors to have the ability to go through what they are going when they create their pieces. So basically when you're creating your own set of generative art pieces, you are going through thousands of iterations and you have to pick the one that you like out of this, which is like a process which in itself tells a lot about you. And some artists wanted this for their pieces because it was meaningful for the piece. And I think it will be like that. For when it's meaningful, it will be used. For when it's not, it will not be used. But again, there is still this part of randomization that can take place. And I think I will encourage people. I mean, I will not, but I will like people to keep using a part of randomization because it's also what's at the core of generative art and this long-form aspect, the ability for the artist to manipulate the parametric space in a meaningful way. This is what's at the core. You're like, when you're evaluating the quality of a project, often you're evaluating the quality of the artist's ability of manipulating the parametric space.

Speaker B: It's just such an interesting concept that, you know, I think as Will said, is a little bit mind-blowing right now, just in terms of the game theory aspect, both with the mint passes and kind of creating the mint that you like and how that plays into the ultimate sense of rarity longer term. Because I know that on some pieces, and maybe these pieces wouldn't be using fx, you know, there's that idea of there's a 2% chance of Getting this piece and it's upside down or it's inverted. But when something is fully minted out with the mint pass and there are all these different features that you could potentially use and 98% of them make them green because they want to sell to Zancan, it's interesting how that puts like a rarity pressure on the ones that are red. And just in terms of, you know, it's really the community that's kind of creating the sense of intrinsic value, maybe aesthetics. It's crazy to think about.

Speaker C: This will actually be the theme of our exhibition in Art Basel Miami, subjective rarity. Right now, you know, there is like this rarity by number metric where basically you're evaluating which is the rarest item in terms of the occurrences of the traits that have appeared in the collection. I prefer to see new kinds of rarity emerging. So as you mentioned, like if everyone likes the blue iteration, they will all mint the blue iteration, but someone will mint the red one. And suddenly the red one becomes the rarest, but also maybe it's the ugliest. So we will have like this interesting new dynamics for the long-form life of the piece after the mint. I'm quite interested in seeing what will be considered as rare after this feature will be released. And I think we will see all kinds of things and it will be different for every collection, which I think fits The narrative also of us being a framework and not, you know, putting a number over this is the rarest item. Now that we will have this new set of tools being released, it will be much more important for communities to arrange themselves into, okay, what do we consider to be the rarest in this set? Now that people have the ability to mint the most beautiful traits, do we consider that this is what we want to get? Or do we want to get the ones that sacrificed themselves into getting a beautiful output but did this for the sake of having something that's different?

Speaker B: And I think that also leads to the subjective nature of beauty. What we consider beautiful now could be changed completely next month or 10 years from now or 100 years from now, especially when we're looking at the context of the trajectory of an artist and how they grow in the subsequent work that they put out. It's just incredibly fascinating.

Speaker A: Well, that's why you're going to have to pay the fee to hold the pass.

Speaker B: I know that's going to be such a huge thing of, what if you have an unminted mint pass held in your wallet for 10 years? A lot of tax.

Speaker A: Yeah, a lot of tax. But imagine if you could mint a Contrapuntos now and you could get yourself like a big chunky black background.

Speaker B: White background. Come on, man.

Speaker A: Both are pretty desirable, but—

Speaker C: That will be some interesting theory because you will have to pay lots to keep this mint pass because again, everyone can buy it at any time regardless of the amount that you put if they pay this amount. So you will have to pay as much, you know, to keep it in your wallet in the first place.

Speaker A: I'm most interested to see— I expect when this feature comes out, we're going to see huge adoption immediately because every artist is going to want to play with it. But what the medium-term breakdown is, because I think personally, I would hate to see it become overused. There's so much charm and just fun, I think, to the truly random mints that we have now. And it also pushes artists to work on their algorithms, right? To make sure that you don't have a lot of duds in there, and it forces them to hone their taste and their style and really push themselves. Like, some of the best collections are the ones that go to 500+ and you look through and they're all awesome. And I wonder if the community will put pressure on artists to just release it and make it customizable and we'll figure it out, right? Do you know what I mean? Like, I just, I wonder what the dichotomy and what the ultimate breakdown is going to be between which artists decide to use it a lot, or which artists continue to use just the pure random. Assuming this comes out sometime in the next several months or like maybe early next year, like it'll make for a very interesting year, I think.

Speaker C: Yeah, you're right to highlight the fact that we will have to wait a bit for the initial burst of projects that will leverage this feature. We can't predict really what will happen. Like there is so many at play there. It will take, I believe, a few months until some sort of Not standard, but until we've taken like some observations out and deducted what worked, what didn't really work. And also I think it's the life of a platform and life of artists right now are much more collaborative than what they used to be. The feedback of the community can happen really much faster and easier than what it used to. And I think also as platform users and as people that know how the market works a little bit, it's also in our duty to educate the artists about it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Try to tell them that, okay, if you do this, you may face this, this, and this, but you're still free to do it. But it's something that we've observed over time, and I think it's very valuable for artists to have this kind of data available because the market is something that's so obscure when you arrive in the crypto lens. You're like, oh cool, I can make money, I'm going to push tens of projects out. You don't really think about what it means for you as an artist and everything. I think it will be another iteration of us as a platform and us as a community needing to educate artists about what it means to publish in such ways.

Speaker B: Is this a good transition point to talk about the other feature that's coming out? I believe at roughly the same time, FX Lens, I believe. First of all, what is FX Lens and how does it really play with FX Params?

Speaker C: It's just a tool that you can use locally. To build projects for fx hash. fx params, you will have the ability, you know, to move sliders to select what you want. We also needed to have a tool that artists can use in their environment to be able to see what it's going to be like on the platform afterwards. So it's somehow quite sophisticated tool because we needed to give as much freedom as artists into building and also keep the constraints of the platform. Within the same tool. It's not something that collectors will interact with. It's for artists to build projects for FX. It's going to be a much more sophisticated way than what we used to have. Basically, it was just a really bad boilerplate that we gave artists.

Speaker A: So it's replacing Sandbox, or is it going to be in addition to Sandbox?

Speaker C: So basically it will replace Sandbox if you look at it in this way. But also sandbox is not really meaningful anymore in a way that people are not really using sandbox a lot to test their projects anymore. And this will completely replace sandbox or the need for sandbox altogether. So sandbox might actually disappear from the website.

Speaker B: Interesting to see what impact that might have on the actual minting experience.

Speaker C: Hopefully none.

Speaker A: So you already kind of alluded to this earlier, but the other new feature that's going to be announced is an evolution of live minting. So what does this mean, that you and some of the fxhash team members aren't going to necessarily need to be around for people to host live minting events? Like, what's coming in terms of live minting?

Speaker C: Live minting tools being open to the public is going to happen very much later in our lifetime. So basically right now there is a lot of monitoring that's required to make sure everything works. We need to have services that run specifically for specific events. And abstracting this into a framework that can be used publicly is very hard. And also for our own events, we haven't yet reached a stage where our tools are what we want them to be. So, you know, there's friction with the wallets. There are lots of things that need to be fixed until we have something that's good for us and perfect— not perfect, but as good as it can be for us, and then we'll start thinking about opening this. This is like not a feature per se, it's more of us continually building new tools in the background and eventually making this open to the public. One feature that's going to be released soon comes out of a need that we have. We wanted for the 1-year anniversary to sell shirts for FX, and we thought, okay, should we set up a Shopify WordPress website, you know, a very standard e-commerce website. We're like, yeah, no, it's not the Web3 way to build it and not very interesting. And so we brainstorm a bit. And one idea that we like a lot is to create consumable tokens. So the idea of consumable tokens is that on our end, for now, we will set up one token to be consumable. on our backend. And on the frontend, you will see that one project has its iterations that are consumable. And when an iteration is consumable, you can, like, consume it to trigger an action. So in this case, it will be ordering a shirt. So if you buy our token, you will be able to consume it for free to get a t-shirt. So it's a way to have both the NFT and also consume it to get the product. in the end and get it in the real world. So it's a bit of a sophisticated system. We will release it only for us in the beginning, but I think it can be a very important tool for artists also in the future because you can, you know, if you want to have your piece being printed only once, you can use this system and you can say, okay, you can consume it once and I will get a print to the address that you've set and sent to the backend. And this token will never be printed again. And we can certify this because it's been consumed and it's been sent.

Speaker A: That's cool. I mean, selling merch on the blockchain, that's a challenging problem. And so doing it like that is an interesting solution. So people can take their Tez, buy a consumable token, and then cash the consumable token in whoever has set up a marketplace there eventually to sell merch. So then do the consumable tokens have a fixed value? And then ultimately, what, whenever it gets cashed in, the person who is cashed into then gets Tez out of like an escrow wallet to them?

Speaker C: You will keep the token once it's consumed.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker C: Maybe consuming is not the perfect term there, but you're only consuming its value in a way. You will still have the NFT in your wallet in the end. That's something that I really wanted to keep in this system because I think that it's too bad if you burn the actual NFT in the end, but you can actually keep it and it will be marked as non-consumable on the platform. So, you know, on the marketplace, we will eventually have this project that are consumable. And you will see on the marketplace which iterations you can buy that are still consumable. So there will be this consumable and non-consumable tokens within the collection, which also will be interesting.

Speaker A: Maybe drainable tokens is a, I don't know.

Speaker B: Such a gamer. Yeah.

Speaker A: That just sounds like a really interesting open feature that, I mean, even us, right? Like potentially if we want to do a waiting to be signed t-shirt or hat, like we could use that. That would probably be what we would do, right? If we were able to sell merch, not that that's on our radar at this point.

Speaker B: It is now.

Speaker A: That would be the way to do it, right?

Speaker B: You just put it on our radar. Yeah. And I think also just in terms of thinking about the tokens as potentially having utility elsewhere, people building things to support the Drains tokens, even, you know, I think the idea of having things in your wallet as a way of identifying like your journey throughout the blockchain, so to speak, There's just so many interesting things to think about and so many different options that could be built upon that so that it continues to provide value way after you've actually spent the token. So super cool. I think we'll have to see it in action to really understand everything that it enables, but so many interesting and cool things that have been talked about so far. My brain is breaking.

Speaker A: And since we will need to see them in action, do you have estimates for between fx, live minting, And consumable tokens, like what are the estimates for when some of these features are going to go live?

Speaker C: Estimates are beginning of December for consumable tokens and beginning of January for fx.

Speaker A: Awesome. And the live minting tools kind of already exist, so it's just kind of a matter of opening them up to other people's hands. So is that going to be kind of like a by-request basis or?

Speaker C: Yeah, for now we want to keep this by request also because we are doing some— we are going to do some quality assurance on The exhibitions that we work with, with the live minting, the quality of the screens representing the artist correctly and everything. All of these things that we've met over the last year when doing these installations, we want to slowly open the live minting on a per-case basis, basically. And yeah, gather some experience and eventually release it to the public when it's really ready.

Speaker A: That's an amazing summary of everything that's going to be announced this week. When the episode goes live. Let's maybe before we wrap the episode, I know we're already over an hour, which is amazing. Talk about some of the stuff that was on the previous roadmap, whether it's still on the roadmap, is it potentially coming the next year or not? So from our last episode and from, I think where the roadmap currently sits, I'm not sure that that document's been updated in a while, but we have curated spaces, which you mentioned earlier as maybe that'll be an extension of fx. And then of course the DAO governance and the big token issue. So I don't know what order you want to tackle those in, but what of the roadmap, the previous roadmap, is still kind of being worked on? And is there an end in sight to any of those features coming out?

Speaker C: Yes, the roadmap on the website, as pointed out, is not updated at all. We actually need to update this more carefully. And also all of this lack of communication to the community are byproduct of us working internally. to find a new way of working together. And while we were doing this, we still had a lot to tackle. So we were like really overflown with what we had to do internally and what we had to process. And we've been working on how to share more about the community, about what we are doing, and setting up true pipelines where everyone has their role on what they are doing. And so that's why you're seeing now these community updates, and you will now see them more regularly. The roadmap on the website is another tick on our to-do list. The whole documentation needs to be cleared a little bit. And yeah, it's clearly not updated. And as for the actual, what's on the roadmap, so curated spaces is going to happen next year. I don't know exactly when. I feel like because it's such a complex system to tackle in a way that you need to properly observe how people would need this. How exactly can it be with the whole ecosystem? So we are in talk also with Object on how we can bring this to life in the most proper way. And as such, it's taking a lot of time. And to me, there are features that are a little bit more important for the platform itself until we reach like the stable state for FXHash. And the token is like, yeah, I know it's this ongoing joke within the crypto community altogether, like when the token? But the problem is that I wanted the fees of the platform to be distributed to the holders of the token, or at least the people that stake it. And the issue with this is, of course, legal, because it makes the token a security. And if it's a security, it has to comply to a wide range of rules. We could basically go cowboy and, you know, release it without taking care of this.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: in the first place, but this would eventually be an issue in the years to come. So that's why, uh, right now we are working with some lawyers to, uh, slowly set it up. But basically the takeoff is that if we want to have redistribute fees to the community, there needs to be a pretty high level of KYC somewhere on the blockchain, which introduces a wide range of new issues altogether. So that's why it's postponed quite indefinitely. Just because there's so much work to do to tackle it in the right way. And we already have so much to do that's, to be fair, more interesting for the ecosystem. Maybe not more interesting, but easier and as much interesting.

Speaker A: Makes sense.

Speaker B: Someday.

Speaker C: Someday.

Speaker A: Soon. Soon. Well, what about, you know, we do talk a lot about the market on the show. Like, are there any more contract-level features that might be added to Dutch auctions? What we have right now is great, but I know something that we've talked about wanting is when there's reserves and an open portion of the Dutch auction, giving artists the ability to tell the Dutch auction to stop when the open portion of the reserves is minted out so that the people who have reservations don't automatically get it at the bottom tier. And then also, like, we've seen some artists do this manually where they refund the difference between if you minted at a higher tier versus the final resting tier. Are there any more market-based features that you might be looking at adding to the contract in the coming months, year?

Speaker C: The thing is, it's like we are talking about many complex systems that should be able to interact together in a sort of abstract way. So basically they should be able to interact together as dictated by the people that mint, and it's very complex to build. Already having reserve list and Dutch auction on-chain, well, different pricing methods on-chain with reserve on-chain is quite complex systems, especially for them to be modular as they are today. I'll be looking into the possibility to do this for the next iteration of the smart contract, which will come with fx. I'm honestly not sure that it's going to be built in just because of the complexity of the matter. I guess it's possible to do it, but we also have to take into consideration that the UI to mint is going to be way more complex if we give the option for these systems to interact together. And that's something also that we take into consideration because although it'd be great for it to be possible, maybe like a few projects need it, but all of the others are going to suffer from it being more complex to define on the UI. But also that's our work to simplify all of this. So I'll think about this. Not sure. It's on the smart contract update to-do list. Having these components interacting together, but I've not yet established the viability of implementation.

Speaker B: I know that we're all looking forward to see what might come out and I guess we'll keep our eyes open for January. Yeah.

Speaker A: January sounds like a big month.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Every month's a big month.

Speaker A: It's also the 1-year anniversary of the podcast, January.

Speaker B: So. That's true.

Speaker C: There will also be on-chain code for the next smart contract, which will be cool.

Speaker B: Is there anything else that we've missed when it comes to platform features, things to look forward to?

Speaker C: Probably.

Speaker B: But nothing obvious comes to mind?

Speaker C: No, you have the big features, but there are a few other things that we're baking in, but more for the long term.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Well, the natural question then is what's coming from you, Ciphrd? It's been a while since we had a drop. It would be fitting to see one from you for the 1-year anniversary, but maybe that's not happening because you've been so busy. Have you been working on any art? Is it possible we'll see something from you sometime soon?

Speaker C: Ah, I don't know. I'd like to, but I'm quite in the mood of building for FX right now. Maybe at some point I will have these 2 weeks where I can't stand FX anymore and just want to work on some generative art. But right now I'm not into this mood. I forced myself a bit out of the producing gen art mood because when I'm in this mood, I can— I'm very monomaniac. Is this a word in English?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: So if I'm into gen art and I want to do it, I can't work on FX for 2 weeks, for instance. I have to work on my projects. So I'm forcing myself into not doing this for now.

Speaker B: That's a bummer.

Speaker C: Yeah, I know.

Speaker A: We saw something that looked like it might've been a new project from you that had made its way onto the t-shirts that were worn at some of the live events. So I was like, maybe that's a project that's getting ready.

Speaker C: Yeah, I threw this project away. Oh no.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: All right. So nothing new coming from Ciphrd, no alpha there. I guess to wrap it up then, I mean, how are you feeling? You feeling optimistic about the next year? Have your feelings changed about fx hash at all over the last year and like the mission? It sounds like from the answers you've given, it sounds like it hasn't, but what's the vibe? Where's Ciphrd at? Maybe that's how we'll wrap it up. How are you feeling?

Speaker C: I will say that the general feeling is excitement. I think like the vision has really not changed, but having realized that there were so many ideas that I had in the back of my head that were not possible to be implemented at a very large It's quite exciting for me. And also that's one of the reasons why I'm not working on my art. That's just because I know that I have the ability now to produce stuff for the gen art community that's going to be very meaningful as a framework in the years to come. And tackling this in the right way takes a lot of time and energy, but also it's so exciting. All of these live installations that we're going to do, if we provide the right framework, we can really make it easy for any artist in the years to come to set up these installations and have people live mint there, you know, use MIDI controllers to tweak the parameters of their PCs. It's like one of the many use cases that I see for FX in the years to come. So yeah, very excited for next year.

Speaker A: Ciphrd, thank you so much for your time. It's been amazing having you on the show again. You're our first repeat guest. I think that's true, right? Who else has been on twice? Only Ciphrd. So great to have you on as always. Great to look back at the year. Obviously we're big fans of everything you're doing, so it's been a pleasure talking to you. We'll let you get back to what I'm sure is a lot of really hard work. Thanks for coming on.

Speaker C: Thanks for having me and for the work you're putting out there. And, uh, always a pleasure, as I said at the beginning.

Speaker B: We'll talk to you in another year or so, I suppose. We'll plan to.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Less, less.

Speaker C: See you next year.

Speaker A: We'll talk to you next year, but it'll be less than a year, maybe, maybe 6 months or something. I'm sure we'll have a reason to have you back on. All right, well, that was Ciphrd. Thanks again. Hope everyone enjoyed this conversation about where fxhash has been and where it's going. That's it for this one, everyone. We'll talk to you again soon. Bye.

Speaker B: Bye.